After the recent report by The Children’s Society that a quarter of 14-year-old girls have self-harmed, many campaigners have called for the root causes of the adolescent mental health crisis to be tackled – rather than just firefighting the symptoms. Resilience lessons, peer mentoring, awareness campaigns and provision of early intervention may be valuable initiatives. But they do […] … learn more→

If academia was a Disney film and I was a street rat (early career researcher) living on the sandy backstreets of Agrabah, who happened to summon a genie, my three top-of-my-head wishes would be: publications, grant money, and a pipeline of non-traditional research outputs. But after the wishes were granted and I was flying away on […] … learn more→

Self-help books are my secret shame. I can’t resist them, especially if I find myself in an airport bookstore. The siren call of the self-help section means I inevitably board the plane clutching two more paperbacks (which I have no room for at home). My latest secret shame is Gretchen Rubin’s ‘The four tendencies: the indispensable […] … learn more→

I’ve been slow to accept that our higher education system is turning into, or already is, a mass indoctrination system. Focusing more on the falling standards and mass academic fraud, I’ve perhaps missed that these were simply side effects of the political goal of indoctrination (and thus education is of no importance) rather than the […] … learn more→

Labor Day is our New Year’s Eve. Rather than vowing to lose weight or spend less time on our phones, as college professors we head into the new school year with a different kind of resolution: to inspire and prepare our students to become agents of positive change. The world’s problems certainly didn’t take a […] … learn more→

rfp-459 While teachers generally take a good look at the role played by their school leaders, this report also suffers from more marked tensions, as shown by the results of the Militens survey (conducted by CERAPS of the Université de Montréal). Lille and the DEPP, department of statistics of the ministry, with the relay of […] … learn more→

Two small boxes in the department of archives and modern manuscripts at Cambridge University Library contain a few pieces of detritus from an extraordinary afternoon in Cambridge in 1897. That day, crowds of undergraduates gathered to protest against a change in ordinances that would allow women to be granted degrees and membership of the university. […] … learn more→